The Celtic Tiger: Incentives, Infrastructure, Tax Rates, Luck?

Ireland is often held up in economic development circles as the success story that proves the effectiveness of using investment incentives. Yet Ireland pursued essentially the same strategy of attracting foreign multinationals from the 1950s through the 1980s with little success. In the 1990s, the Irish economy boomed, creating the Ireland we know today. This chapter will analyze the relative contribution of incentives, EU infrastructure and training support, education and low tax rates to try to determine what finally went right.